Pete Townshend
Pete Townshend, leader of The Who, has been arrested and “was questioned at a police station in southwest London on suspicion of possessing and making indecent images of children and of incitement to distribute such images, a Scotland Yard spokesperson told the BBC.”
Serious charges, and I’m particularly bothered by the “making” and “incitement to distribute”, as this implies something considerably more than passively viewing pictures. Methinks Townshend also needs to get and listen to a good lawyer because every time he attempts to explain things he gets in deeper.
“Over the weekend, Townshend admitted that he used a credit card to access an Internet child porn site, but claimed he did so only to conduct research for an autobiography that will address his own abusive childhood. Townshend… said he thinks he might have been molested between the ages of five and six. He insisted that he viewed the Internet child porn strictly to see if he could conjure up blocked memories.”
The translation here I’m guessing is, The police found child porn images on his computer. Another point, the websites in question are way hard core, are illegal, and thus, not easy to find.
“The sites contained hard-core pornographic images and would have been impossible to stumble upon by chance, said Jackie Bennett, a spokeswoman for the National Crime Squad, which investigates serious crime in Britain. “You would have to make a decision to subscribe to the Web site and purchase the images,” she said.”
Thomas Reedy, head of the portal website that sent subscribers to the child porn sites, was sentenced to 1335 years to life in Texas.
The breakthrough in the case came when the encryption of the credit cards was broken.
“But the fatal weakness in the system was that all the subscribers had to provide a credit card number so that Reedy’s gateway could verify who they were before charging them for access to the 5,700 sites within the network. Once the authorities cracked the code scrambling the credit card numbers they were able to track down the owners of the cards.”